Those tiny black rectangles of epoxy aren’t black boxes anymore. Decapsulating ICs is becoming somewhat common, and if you’re reverse engineering a chip-on-board epoxy blob, or just figuring out if the chip you bought is the chip you wanted, you’ll need to drop some acid. Usually this means finding someone with the knowhow to decap a chip, or having enough confidence in yourself to mess around with fuming nitric acid. Now Dangerous Prototypes has a better solution – Dirty Decapsulation. Send your chip to Dangerous Prototypes, and they’ll melt away the epoxy and take a few pictures of the die hidden inside your chip.

Dirty Decapsulation is Dangerous Prototype’s addition to their array of hacker services including cheap, crappy PCBs and SLA printing service. Dirty Decapsulation follows in the tradition of these other services; it’s not the best you can possibly get, but you’re not paying thousands of dollars for the job.

Right now, Dirty Decapsulation will take a chip, strip off the epoxy, and take a few pictures. These pictures are stitched together, producing a medium quality image of the die. No, you can’t see individual gates, and you can’t see different layers of metal and silicon. If you want that, you’ll need some nitric or a few thousand dollars. Dirty Decapsulation is just to verify the chip’s identity and give a rough idea of the layout of the die.